Can online kids be verified?

This question keeps coming up because politicians keep insisting it has to happen and ID verification professionals keep saying it’s not possible. And it’s not, actually, unless or until personal information on minors is as available as personal information on adults. By personal info, I mean credit records, mortgages, mother’s maiden name, social security number, etc., all pulled together in the kind of database credit bureaus have. There is no such database on minors for any ID or age-verification technology to check against. And does this society, particularly parents, want such a national database on children to exist, given all the database hacking and theft in the news in recent years and given the attractiveness of squeaky-clean minors’ credit records to ID thieves? In fact, there is a federal law that protects children’s personal info in the US. So, certainly, online adults’ ages and identities can be verified, but not children’s. Jacqui Cheng recently blogged about this in ArsTechnica.com, referring to a one-day conference that thoroughly vetted the options and aired many perspectives, hosted by the Washington-based Progress & Freedom Foundation; here’s the transcript. And speaking of children’s privacy and databases, check out “Half a million kids’ DNA on UK police database” in the UK’s The Register. It reports that the DNA data of 4.1 million people are now in the database, more than 520,000 of them people under 16. Britons can have their info removed (and presumably their children’s), but only 115 did last year. The comments at the bottom of the article offer a good look at the privacy implications.